Guild Wars 2

Hypothetical situation, basically derived from the earlier Wintersday/ecto thread.

1. You have a crafting discipline.
2. There are very cheap materials for this discipline.
3. You can produce a level 80 rare item that will cost less than an ectoplasm.
4. You can extract this crafted item with a probability of getting an ecto, which on average (taking into account the chance of getting nothing), will sell at a higher price than your finished good.

If this is considered an exploit, I’d be alarmed. It’s essentially saying that making money from crafting, even if it comes from an unintentional effect, violates some element of the game’s code of conduct.

One must consider that if the above practice is done on a large enough scale, the following will happen:

1. Prices of ectos would decrease
2. Prices of ingredients/materials would increase

Any sort of “profitability” in this action would only be temporary and the market would adjust in reaction.

Oh come on, you people are still going on with this?

The Snowflake trinkets had a pretty good chance of returning majority of the materials you put in. This is not true for regular crafting items, which take 15 fine crafting materials.

And of course the markets will adjust. It doesn’t change the nature of the exploits, which accelerated or perverted the price of a specific item.